Aurelia Butler

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    in Music

    Tim Mohr, DJ and German Translator Who Ghostwrote Paul Stanley’s Memoir, Dies at 55

    An American who had lived abroad, he sought out books by up-and-coming German writers, while ghostwriting memoirs for rock stars like Paul Stanley.Tim Mohr, an American who worked as a disc jockey and freelance writer in Berlin in the 1990s, diving deep into the city’s fervent post-Communist underground, before using his experiences to turn out sensitive, award-winning English translations of works by up-and-coming German writers, died on March 31 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 55.His wife, Erin Clarke, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.Mr. Mohr arrived in Germany in 1992 with a yearlong grant to teach English. He did not speak a word of German, so the program sent him to Berlin, a melting pot of cultures where English was often the second language.He stayed for six years. By day, he worked as a journalist for local English-language magazines, including the Berlin edition of Time Out; at night, he was a D.J. in the city’s ever-expanding club scene.He later remarked that his time spent traveling among Berlin’s many underground subcultures gave him a thorough education in a form of street German that set him up to work as a translator.One of his first major translation projects, in 2008, was “Feuchtgebiete” (“Wetlands”), a sexually explicit coming-of-age novel by Charlotte Roche packed with raunchy, idiomatic slang that only someone with Mr. Mohr’s background could render in English.“I read the book for the eventual U.S. publisher when they were considering buying the rights,” he told The Financial Times in 2012. “And I said to the editor, ‘You know, you’ll be hard pressed to find an academic translator who is as familiar with terminology related to anal sex as a former Berlin club D.J. is.’”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty Bridal Collection Teases Fans Yet Again

    Savage x Fenty’s new collection is the latest entry on a list of times the singer and her partner, ASAP Rocky, have alluded to being engaged.On Tuesday, Rihanna announced a new bridal collection from her lingerie company, Savage x Fenty, with a retro-style video on Instagram. Wearing a lacy pink lingerie set paired with matching thigh-high stockings and a mini veil, all from the collection, she posed beside a massive wedding cake on top of a table before kicking the cake to the ground.The new collection drew a great deal of attention, at least some of which was because it seemed to allude to a pressing matter for her fervent fan base: Is Rihanna getting married?The collection arrived the same day that ASAP Rocky, her longtime partner, appeared in a Vogue cover story in which he gushed about her. Rumors of an official engagement, or of even a pending wedding, have frequently followed the couple. And for many fans, the visuals of the singer in a veil felt like foreshadowing, most likely egged on by her captioning a photo from the collection with “all you gotta do is say yes.”Representatives for Rihanna and Savage x Fenty did not respond when asked directly if the singer was engaged, but fans took to the comments section of her posts to speculate.“Crying imagining Rihanna’s wedding dress,” Stephanie Tinsley, a 27-year-old filmmaker from Chicago, commented under the singer’s post.“It would be the most fashionable wedding of the decade,” Ms. Tinsley said of the couple, who are known for taking fashion risks.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Concert Cold War in a Quiet Enclave

    When Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. designed Forest Hills Gardens, he was trying to bring the respite of an English village into the bustle of New York City.A landscape architect and city planner like his father, one of Central Park’s designers, Mr. Olmsted laid out tree-lined alphabetical streets and open spaces in a pocket of Queens about nine miles east of Times Square. In 1909, these were not mere aesthetic choices: Forest Hills Gardens was an import of the English garden city, a turn-of-the-century movement in urban planning rooted in a utopian ethic.Mr. Olmsted planned for the Tudor-style houses to thoughtfully integrate with their manicured landscapes, for winding pathways to promote leisurely strolls and for curved residential streets to discourage vehicles from passing through.He did not plan, however, for the Australian rock band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. Or for the sold-out shows by the Irish singer Hozier. Or really for anything about the concert venue that was once a storied tennis stadium and is now rattling both windows and nerves in the neighborhood.“It does disrupt the calm,” Mitch Palminteri, a Forest Hills Gardens resident, said at a recent community board meeting. “I don’t want to close my window on a summer night.”Others like what the concerts represent.“Music is about community,” said Joseph Cooney, who lives in adjacent Forest Hills. “We have it in spades in this neighborhood. How can we ever let that go away?”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • 138 Shares119 Views

    in Movies

    Michael B. Jordan, Ryan Coogler and a Dozen Years of Collaborations

    Of all the storied bonds between visionary directors and their movie star alter egos — Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, Pedro Almodóvar and Antonio Banderas, Kelly Reichardt and Michelle Williams — few have been as seamless as the one between Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan.Since their first meeting, during casting for “Fruitvale Station” (2013), Jordan has starred or appeared in all five features Coogler has directed, including two “Black Panther” movies and “Creed.” Their latest film, “Sinners,” in theaters April 18, raises the ante by assigning Jordan not one part but two — he plays the twin brothers Smoke and Stack, enterprising gangsters who encounter supernatural resistance to the juke joint of their dreams in Jim Crow-era Mississippi.Coogler, a former college football athlete, said he learned the value of a consistent partnership from playing wide receiver.“I knew he was going to be great in the movie,” Coogler said of Jordan in their first collaboration, “Fruitvale Station.”Dana Scruggs for The New York Times“Sometimes I’d have four or five different quarterbacks in a season, and that was always tough,” he said. “It gave me a real appreciation for how important chemistry is when you can find it.”In a joint interview earlier this month, at a cocktail lounge in New York City, Coogler and Jordan broke down their career-long working relationship, film by film. The conversation took an emotional turn during the discussion of “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” which was made after the death of Chadwick Boseman, star of the original “Black Panther.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘The Voyeurs,’ ‘Cyrano’ and More Streaming Gems

    Exciting new riffs on 1990s genre movies are among the highlights of this month’s recommendations on your subscription streaming services.‘Cyrano’ (2022)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.Edmond Rostand’s late-19th-century play “Cyrano de Bergerac” has proved to be quite a durable text, which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise; few things translate as well, no matter the period or genre, than the feeling that the person you love could never feel the same. This adaptation by the director Joe Wright (“Pride & Prejudice”), first presented onstage by the New Group in 2019, changes the source of the title character’s low self-image: Instead of an oversize nose, he is of undersize height. Peter Dinklage is marvelous in the starring role, finding the cockiness and bluster that Cyrano uses to compensate, while showing the beating heart just under that hard surface. He also provides a pleasant baritone for the songs by members of the National, which are the film’s other key deviation from Rostand’s original. They’re a masterstroke, beautifully conveying the longing and regret of this tragic tale.‘The Last Stop in Yuma County’ (2024)Stream it on Paramount+.Three cheers for this A+ premise: The pumps are empty at the last gas station for 100 miles and the truck with the refill is running late, so stranded motorists are killing time at the diner next door — among them, two crooks who made off with a trunkful of bank loot. The writer and director Francis Galluppi works from his own Swiss watch of a script, equally influenced by “The Desperate Hours” and the dusty neo-noirs of the 1990s, where the turns are unpredictable yet organic and precise, and there are chances for every one if its character actors to shine. Snappily paced, delightfully stylish and refreshingly bleak, this movie is an assurance that we’re going to hear much, much more from this gifted first-time filmmaker.‘The Voyeurs’ (2021)Stream it on Hulu and Amazon Prime Video.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Joan Chen: Exacting Artist, Cool Mom

    When Joan Chen was in her early 20s she met with the director Ang Lee about starring in his 1993 film “The Wedding Banquet,” a New York-set rom-com about a Taiwanese American in a relationship with another man who marries a woman in need of a green card. Chen was a star in China but had recently moved to Los Angeles, and was intrigued.“Getting married for a green card was something we all kind of thought about,” she said during a recent video interview from her home in San Francisco. “I had such a wedding myself. So it’s a great story.” (She has since remarried.)But it took years to get the funding and Chen never ended up playing the role of the bride. The actress, who turns 64 this month, plays the bride’s mother in the remake directed by Andrew Ahn, in theaters April 18.“I feel like it’s some sort of a karma, it’s some sort of a closure,” she said, her voice growing almost wistful. “It’s also interesting, time passing yet we’re all still here. So fortunate. What a wonderful thing.”Joan Chen in San Francisco. “I’m, in a way, becoming a character actor,” she said.Amy Harrity for The New York TimesThe details of her character, May Chen, are a sign of the changing times: Rather than denying the sexuality of her daughter Angela (Kelly Marie Tran), May is a vocal L.G.B.T.Q. ally who gets down with lion dancers and a drag queen. Angela agrees to marry the boyfriend (Han Gi-chan) of her best friend (Bowen Yang) when the groom agrees to pay for in vitro fertilization treatments for the bride’s girlfriend (Lily Gladstone), in exchange for a chance to stay in the United States.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    What’s So Funny About These Albums?

    Comedians have always wanted to be pop and rock stars — or at least, enough of them have gotten comfortable with a guitar and a drum track to make it seem so. It’s a long and eclectic tradition, including Steve Martin, Weird Al, Bo Burnham, Rachel Bloom, Donald Glover, Randy Rainbow and John Early.Now there’s a new crop of albums from entertainers across the comic spectrum. Some of them regularly use music as part of their act, like Cat Cohen, whose repertoire is all cabaret style. And some are left-field turns, like the profane opus from the writer and actor Jordan Firstman, or the thoughtful, genuine emo tunes of Mae Martin. Then there’s Kyle Mooney, whose record is either all gags — or none. In comedy, like music, it’s all in how you hit the beat.Jordan FirstmanJordan Firstman’s “Secrets” is a concept album built out of confessions strangers sent to him over social media.Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesThe social media favorite Jordan Firstman didn’t expect to release a record, let alone a concept album based on the private confessions of strangers on the internet. But on “Secrets,” out this month, he lets it rip, in ways that are almost entirely unprintable here. Its party anthem single describes a dude quest to bond over anatomy. (The video, directed by the boundary-pusher Cody Critcheloe, has more than a quarter-million views.)“Secrets” began as a pandemic-era riff, when Firstman, 33, publicly responded to his Instagram DMs. He accumulated tens of thousands of private missives — he requested the most “depraved” but also “Beautiful. Lyrical. And Random” stuff; endless inspiration.A few years later, with a friend — the musician and producer Brad Oberhofer — he began song-ifying them. “I’m like, such a lyric queen,” he said, and the secrets were ready-made titles, misspellings and all, like “I’m I Lesbian,” the album’s Lilith Fair-flavored closer. Capitol Records bought his pitch before he even left its parking lot, he said in a video interview.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • 138 Shares159 Views

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    Betsy Arakawa, Gene Hackman’s Wife, Asked About Flulike Symptoms Before Deaths

    Videos, photographs and police reports released by the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office in New Mexico offered a look into the days before Betsy Arakawa and Mr. Hackman died.Days before she and her husband, the actor Gene Hackman, died at their home, Betsy Arakawa repeatedly searched online about flu- and Covid-like symptoms, according to records released on Tuesday by New Mexico authorities.The records — including witness interviews, photographs of the scene and police body camera footage — provided some new insights into the final days of the couple at their home near Santa Fe in February.After his wife’s death, Mr. Hackman, 95, lived alone in the home for nearly a week before dying of heart disease, with Alzheimer’s disease as a contributing factor.Ms. Arakawa, 65, died from hantavirus, which is contracted through the exposure to excrement from rodents and can cause flulike symptoms before progressing to shortness of breath, as well as cardiac and lung failure.Police records released in the case on Tuesday included Ms. Arakawa’s Google searches a couple of days before her death, including “can Covid cause dizziness?” and “Flu and nosebleeds” on Feb. 10.The next day, she emailed her massage therapist to cancel an appointment, writing that her husband woke up that morning with “flu/cold-like symptoms” but had tested negative for Covid. That day, she ordered oxygen canisters from Amazon for “respiratory support.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More